The people of the third world are not poor because they are lazy, a significant factor of it is because they are exploited by the richer countries and are paid very little. Poverty is also caused by famine, the people who depend on money from selling their crops would be devastated by a famine and make them lose a lot of money. Natural disasters cause a lot of poverty and famine, in Bangladesh the farmers build shelters every year for their families and produce crops but the floods wipe their entire crop out and destroy their home. The recent floods in this country have affected many people but not as severely as the ones in Bangladesh because the people in this country would have insurance on their homes and belongings but the people in Bangladesh wouldn’t. The recent earthquake in India has devastated cities and killed thousands, however the earthquakes that happen in California, Los Angeles and Japan are fairly easily controlled because of the infrastructure of the country, the rich countries have various technologies and systems that prevent as much damage as possible. This shows the ways different countries get affected by the same type of disaster. The reader who wrote this letter says that they “work for their things”, but they are given the opportunity, and get paid a decent wage. The reader says that they went to Kenya and it “looked very nice”, but they would have only seen the tourist area where there is the most wealth. The ‘real’ Kenya is very different. This person takes our healthcare facilities for granted because s/he’s is used to always having a doctor to go to, but poorer countries don’t have many doctors and even less people go to them regularly. The reason why richer countries give aid to poorer countries when there is a disaster is because they don’t have the funding or the means to deal with it properly on their own. This person is talking about the poor countries being over populated but they are in fact sparsely populated. It is the richer and more developed countries, which are densely populated.
The British and European empires took over the poor countries and changed their economic infrastructure to suit themselves. They changed the goods that the poor countries produced such as the Indian textile industry, which was replaced by British manufactured goods. The reason why rich countries colonised other countries was to exploit their natural resources and to gain raw materials for their industries. There are many different views on colonialism. Some people think that colonisation has helped some countries by industrialising them like Singapore, Thailand and Australia. Some people also think that if India wasn’t colonised it would be an MEDC now. But other countries that haven’t been colonised are even poorer like Nepal. In some countries being colonised structured their economies provided a sound infrastructure like roads, railways and bridges this shows considerable financial and technical investment. The colonists also left an educational and judicial framework, which at least gave the newly independent countries something to modify. However their export were reduced to one or two things, which were the ones that made the most money.
The reason third world countries don’t grow ‘proper’ crops is because of neo-colonisation. The rich countries colonised the poor countries and forced them to grow ‘cash crops’ like sugar, coffee and cocoa. So they could get the profits from selling them on the world market. They pay the poor countries that produce the crops very little. They do this by either devaluing their currency or putting down the price on the stock exchange. They bring the raw materials to the rich countries and process them. They then sell the processed products at a high rate. A lot of poor countries grow coffee for multi national companies. These companies only accept the ‘best’ crop and a lot is wasted. This means the people who grow the coffee don’t get as much money. The coffee beans are sold at a relatively low price to the rich countries. If a company can buy the same product somewhere else but at a cheaper rate they will stop buying from the previous grower. The coffee beans are roasted, this is where most of the profit is made because it is done in a rich country it is then sold at cafes and other shops. In a jar of coffee that costs £1.99 the growers from the poor countries only get about 10p.
The reader says that the third world countries “still don’t seem to be able to pay back the money” but they have already paid it back a number of times but the interest rate is so high they can’t keep up with the payments. In the 1970’s the countries became very rich because of the oil that they traded, they had a lot of money but wanted to make more so they tried to persuade the poorer countries to borrow money from them but pay it back with interest. At the beginning the interest was 4% but when the rich countries didn’t have as much money they put the interest rates up. It rose as high as 21% in the 1980’s, the countries that had borrowed the money found it increasingly difficult to repay their loans. Say a country borrowed a billion (1000000000) pounds in the early 1970’s when the interest rate was at 4% and had to pay it back every month for twenty years, with compound interest it would be 240 payments of about £9 million, but ten years later if the interest rate went up to 21% the monthly payback would be about £50 million. The country would have already paid back the original debt before ten years. The country wouldn’t be able to pay each instalment so the loan would be extended and restructured at a lower interest rate. If it was extended another 10 years so it was now 20 years but with 10% interest the monthly payments would be about £25 million. But the interest rates would go up again and they would have to extend the loan again. It all goes round in a vicious circle and the poor countries can’t pay off the debt. So the western world writing off the third world debt is in fact reducing expensive profits that they would have made and not just giving the money away for free.
The reader finds it odd that we provide aid to poorer countries than ourselves. But it is mostly the rich countries fault that they are in poverty in the first place. England colonised a third of the world in the Victorian times. Some of the colonies included India, Pakistan and many parts of Africa which all are part of the third world. We also aid other countries because we are morally obligated to, we can’t just sit there when people are dying and we know if we did something it would make a difference. Politics affect the reason why we aid other countries as well. If countries get too poor the global economy will be affected so the governments aid those countries but are actually helping themselves as well. If they help the poor countries to stabilise their economies they might buy products from them in the future.
In conclusion I think that anyone who sees the people in third world countries as poor because they are lazy and don’t acknowledge the richer countries part in them being in poverty are misinformed by lack of education. I hope that this letter has changed peoples thoughts and feelings on poverty and by creating a better-educated country we can alleviate poverty in the world.
Yours sincerely
Daniel Underhill
Bibliography
World vision (April 1991)
Low pay unit (March 1991)
Linx Magazine (winter 1990)
Save the children
New internationalist (February 1990)
The Times (April 1993)
http://www.cafod.org.uk (February 2001)
http://Indonesia.elga.net.id (February 2001)
